GoPro CEO: A Selfie Realization Propelled the Company

GoPro learned early that vanity sells in the form of selfie videos. GoPro’s challenge will be to evolve from a gadget company into a media enterprise because hardware can fairly easily be copied.

— Dennis Schaal

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As GoPro debuted on Nasdaq, after having raised $427 million in its IPO, founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman says a seminal moment for the company occurred when it realized something about the “selfie” prior to the selfie craze.

In the opening minutes of its debut June 26, GoPro’s stock price was trading up around 35% to $32.40.

“The first GoPro was a wrist camera for me to capture my friends surfing,” Woodman told CNBC [see video embedded below]. “And it took a few years to realize that there are a lot more people in the world that want to capture themselves doing what they want, what they love to do, their passions, their interests, than there are people that want to capture other people.”

“And so the big aha moment for GoPro was enabling the world to turn the camera around on itself, and that’s led to perspectives of life that was never possible before and incredible content that was never possible.

“It’s a business that’s essentially built on our customer-shared experiences, the original selfie. The original selfie.”

Woodman believes that GoPro, with its array of cameras for action-oriented activities, will turn out to be more than a gadget company, as it has ambitions to be a media/content company.